March 8, 2013

Art Club 2000, Untitled (Conran’s I) (1993), Courtesy of The New Museum

Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, on view now at The New Museum, is a look 20 years into the not-so-distant-past, using 1993 (and the works produced and shown within that calendar year) as a critical reflection point into recent art history and practice.read more …

March 1, 2013

DRAFT is the first exhibition of artist Michelle Grabner’s work at Autumn Space Gallery in Chicago. In this show, Michelle Grabner presents five large scale works and an edition. Included in the exhibition are a monochromatic woven gesso relief and a collaborative sculpture with Michelle Grabner’s husband Brad Killam.

Michelle Grabner is a Professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago and runs The Suburban and The Poor Farm with her husband Brad Killam. She will co-curate the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is included in the permanent collections at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition is intended to provide support for emerging curators, reinforce interest in curatorial practices, and encourage new projects in the field of contemporary art. Akbank Sanat is proud to present the exhibition realized by the winning proposal of Alejandra Labastida at Akbank Art Centre, Istanbul.

The Life of Others. Repetition and Survival“If repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law. It is against the law… If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, and instantaneity opposed to variation / and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favor of a more profound and more artistic reality.”
–Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference

Deleuze states that unlike resemblance, repetition is an act that arises in relation only to that which has no equal or equivalent and therefore concerns non-exchangeable and non-replaceable singularities. It is essentially a force that opposes the singular–as a transgression or exception–to the particular capable of being subsumed by laws. This project aims to postulate that the proliferation of artistic practices generated around appropriation and citation strategies—the translation and recreation of historical pieces or events—responds to this force that affirms the political status of the singularity—of the non-replaceable being—versus the domesticated paradigm of the equivalent and interchangeable.

Most exhibitions that explore this tendency focus on the decision that the artist makes from the present in order to rescue specific events and works. This project proposes to extend the question in order to consider not only the recreative will of the artist but also this singular power that wills itself. Walter Benjamin refers to “translatability” as an inherent demand of the original and therefore as the supreme proof of the life of the works of art. The relation between a translation and the original is literally vital: the former emerges as the result of an act of survival of the latter. It is, of course, not just a simple relation of equality and similarity but rather a process of renovation and evolution that unchains the conditions of possibility for a critical reformulation.

This critical process land on different strategies: translations, covers, reprises, recreations, re-appropriations; but what all of them share is repetition as the conduct of a vital relationship with the original. It is not just about postulating a reconstructed and reanimated body, but rather about making it present, for the first time, a second instance; or, as Deleuze proposes, to carry the first time to the “nth” power without having to pass through a second time. These works of art may therefore be inserted into a horizon where mimesis is understood not as representation but rather as a ritualized actualization. Repetition internalizes and therefore reverses itself: … it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days; or Monet´s first water lily which repeats all the others.Immersed in the apparatus of repetition, the works of the artists in this show reveal a power—a will willing itself despite every transformation and against every law. It is a will that postulates repetition as an essential task arising from the self-determination and freedom of a non-replaceable being.

February 9, 2013

This video provides you with a walkthrough of Outsider Art Fair 2013 in New York. The fair was founded by Sanford Smith in 1993 and features Outsider, Self-Taught and Folk Art. The first 15 years, the fair was held at New York’s Puck Building. Wide Open Arts, a company formed by art dealer Andrew Edlin relocated the Outsider Art Fair to Chelsea at the site of the former Dia Foundation. Among the participants are mainly galleries from the US, but there are also galleries from Brussels, Tokyo, Lausanne, and London. The 2013 edition ran from January 31 to February 3, 2013 at Center 548 in New York.

Considering the ongoing cuts to the cultural sector across Europe, the situation in Denmark – where the largest exhibition space for contemporary art in Copenhagen, the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, has been left floundering – can hardly be said to be severe. In fact the previous Danish Minister of Culture, Uffe Elbæk, was proud to have been able to secure an additional 20 million kroner (£2.2 million) to the cultural sector for the next four years, and the Kunsthal has recently appointed the well-respected curator Jacob Fabricius as head.1 Still, the short-sightedness of recent ‘prioritisations’ to cultural funding, to use Elbæk’s term, calls for an investigation and rethinking of the criteria that are used to determine the value of both small and large arts organisations by public funding bodies.Read more …

January 18, 2013

A copper-engraved frontispiece showing Ferrante Imperato’s Wunderkammer is part of the “Rooms of Wonder” show.

Many exhibitions convey the propulsive force of human curiosity, but few manage to do so as engrossingly and with as much immediacy as“Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899,” a lavish repast of illustrated rare books and ephemera at the Grolier Club. The appetite for knowledge about foreign lands, unfamiliar animals and all the workings of the world — both natural and man-made — permeates this show, which delves into the origins of the modern museum.read more …

January 12, 2013

Since their graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1990, brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman have continually pushed the envelope with their iconoclastic, ambitious sculptures. Frequently incorporating what they call “bankrupt” imagery, so frequently used by contemporary that it has lost much of its original meaning, the artists create large-scale sculptural works that have frequently drawn fierce reactions from critics and gallery visitors.read more …